I confess that although I did not write a great deal in this blog in 2016, there were certainly plenty of things going on in my life and in my world. It would be an easy way out to say that the events of this year simply rendered me speechless, and I doubt that there would be many who would argue with me on that. Personally, I hit many milestones and manifested a number of things I had been hoping to achieve. However, the harbingers of doom and despair came in the form of the deaths of many artists who influenced my life, and the lives of many others.

As the solstice comes upon us here in the Northern Hemisphere our thoughts turn to surviving the cold. While it's considerably milder here in Scotland than it was while I was teaching in New York, cold it is and cups of tea provide welcome warmth. It's hardly surprising that people in the Middle Ages measured their lives in winters survived. In many ways the mid-winter celebrations offer a chance to celebrate that hope and restore it for the lean months ahead.

It's the perfect time to consider the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, which I think of as a companion to The Wanderer. Both elegiac poems that mourn a lost past, they celebrate the power of the comitatus, the loyal troop of warriors and find poetic resonance in the harsh world of winter.

Years ago, when I was much younger, I read Rita Mae Brown's Ruby Fruit Jungle, where I first learned the tern "polymorphous perverse." At the time, I thought it was a term created by the author to describe her emergent sexuality, and I always thought perhaps the term applied to me as a polyamorous, bi, pagan female. It wasn't until years later that I learned the term was actually coined by Freud to denote people who are able to find sexual gratification outside of accepted societal norms. I was elated to learn that the term could still apply to me, which is why I've decided to use it to name the oracle deck I've been creating.

(By the way, I was gone for awhile. Did you miss me? I've had my head buried in projects like these! I'm back to tell you all about them).

Performing artists, familiar with the backstage areas of theatres - where illusions of sumptuous grandeur are exposed as shams of cardboard, canvas and crayola - are apt to imagine with Shakespeare that “All the world's a stage.” Or in movie terms, that life is like “The Truman Show” - a soap opera with hidden cameras. There is more going on behind the scenes than anyone suspects.

As a chaplain working in a healthcare setting, I am intimately familiar with the current efforts to include the emotional and spiritual aspects of health into a more traditional allopathic medical model. In many respects, we are seeing great progress as integrative and functional medical models are starting to incorporate more holistic and alternative treatments like reiki and acupuncture in treatment plans for patients. But what does it mean to have an integrated model of health? And why is that so important in times of distress, especially now around the holidays and as a result of current political events?